


Cephalophore

by kaasknot



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: (Last kiss), (take the fact that i forgot to add that last tag until 10hrs after i posted as your barometer), Barricade Day coda, Blatant symbolism, Body Horror, Canon Divergence, Canon-Era, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Eventual not-sad ending: an attempt was made, First Kiss, Gen, Gore, M/M, Necrophilia, Sacrilege, hagiography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 15:13:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6157765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaasknot/pseuds/kaasknot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire woke. It was the sudden cessation of noise that did it, ringing through the Corinthe as the silence after a final chord rings through a concert hall. A deathly hush had fallen, and Grantaire’s skin prickled. </p><p>“Enjolras?” he said, raising his head from the table.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cephalophore

Grantaire woke. It was the sudden cessation of noise that did it, ringing through the Corinthe as the silence after a final chord rings through a concert hall. A deathly hush had fallen, and Grantaire’s skin prickled. 

“Enjolras?” he said, raising his head from the table. A mangled vision swam to the fore, a memory of a revolutionary upon the new-built barricade, Athena carrying the Tricolor, his face upturned and twisted in irritation. Grantaire shook it away. He rubbed his eyes, feeling the bloom of a headache behind his temple. He looked up. Red paint washed over the wall across from him; he stared at it, confused. A hole in the plaster, chest-height, as though from a bullet, and a bloody-red streak to where the fallen Guardsman lay.

The rush of cold fear through his veins banished every drop of the spirits clouding his brain. He leapt to his feet, his chair scraping across the floor; the thicket of bottles standing about his resting place clattered uneasily together.

“Joly? Bossuet?” He kicked his way around the table, bottles falling over and bouncing off the floorboards. “Courfeyrac, where are you? Bahorel?”

The smell of powder hung thick in the air, and blood, the reek of it so thick Grantaire retched. The sour taste of old wine coated the back of his throat. He took up an empty bottle, holding it like a club; who knew if the barricade still stood, whether the Guardsmen had won, or if his friends…

They would not be silent if…

“Enjolras?” He said again, louder, unable to keep the fear from his voice.

“Here,” a weak voice answered. It came from the other side of the billiards table; another ominous streak of blood congealed down the wall in the corner.

The noise Grantaire made wasn’t entirely human. Desperation ran jagged and sharp through his body, focused on one thing only: Enjolras yet lived. The bottle fell from his nerveless fingers, and he pushed aside the billiards table. What he saw sent him to his knees.

Not content with merely shooting Enjolras--Grantaire counted no fewer than eight bloody bullet-holes in the wall above them--the Guardsmen had taken exception to his corpse as well, and hacked his fair head from his shoulders. It lay at a twisted angle beside his neck, a parody of a turned head; blood matted the curls along one side. Enjolras’s eyes, his precious, ultramarine eyes, were open, staring into nothing.

They blinked.

“Grantaire,” Enjolras’s severed head whispered. “What has happened?”

“Putain de merde!” Grantaire scrabbled back over the bloody floor.

“Please, I can’t turn my head. What has happened?”

“I am still drunk, this is a, an absinthe dream, it can’t be real--”

“Grantaire, we don’t have time for this, I must speak with Combeferre.”

“My God, _my God_ , you’re all dead, you stupid fool what have you done--”

“Grantaire!” Enjolras’s voice cracked through the still, hazy air. Grantaire fell silent, his heart pounding in his throat. He turned, and with no more ceremony than that, vomited over the floor. The stench of bile and sour wine added to the bouquet of shit, blood, piss, and fear. He wiped his mouth with a trembling hand.

“If you are quite done,” Enjolras’s _severed head_ said tartly.

Grantaire stared. Enjolras--his head--lay only a little apart from his body, and at an angle that prevented him from seeing the damage. His cheeks were a waxy gray, but there was life in them still, and shudders crept through Grantaire’s limbs at its wrongness. Enjolras heaved a sigh, and his body’s chest rose and fell.

“What--” Grantaire cleared his throat. “What do you remember?”

Enjolras’s eyes roamed over the room. “I remember the barricade falling. I remember throwing paving stones upon the advancing Guardsmen, and--” his voice quavered. “I remember Combeferre falling. I had forgotten until just now. Courfeyrac, too, and Feuilly, and.” He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was small. “I remember locking the door, watching good men shot through the stairwell; I remember staring down the firing squad, and the retort of their muskets. Grantaire, _what has happened_?”

“How do you feel?” he asked, instead of answering.

“Not well. I can’t feel my fingers or toes, and there is a great pain in my neck. My head hurts.” His voice was taut, high-pitched from restrained fear. “I beg you, Grantaire, tell me why you look as though you have seen a ghost.”

“It is because I think I have,” Grantaire answered. “Or if not a ghost, then some trick of my mind, or of God. I would say the Devil, but I don’t think he would defile you; you lived too pure a life for that one to find a foothold.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“It is not a situation that lends itself to sense.”

“Be serious!”

Grantaire fell silent, unable to maintain even the semblance of humor.

“Something is wrong, Grantaire. I don’t--am I a cripple? Did the Guardsmen sever my spine, but somehow leave the rest of me intact?”

A terrible bleat of laughter escaped Grantaire’s lips, and he clapped a hand over his mouth. Enjolras’s eyes widened, his beautiful face twisting into a grimace. “That’s it, isn’t it,” he said, his--his breath coming, somehow, faster. “Je vous salue, Marie, pleine des grâces, le Seigneur avec vous. It is nothing. I will find a way.”

“Enjolras,” Grantaire said, struggling against the inappropriate laughter that sought escape. “It is a great deal worse than that.”

“I have already accepted my death, that is nothing.”

“No, I--” he stopped. Steeled himself. Hesitated despite, then brought himself to say, “There is no easy way to explain it. May I touch you?”

Enjolras’s expression was vulnerable. Scared in a way Grantaire had never seen, not even when Courfeyrac had fallen sick with food poisoning after cholera had taken hold of the city.

The silence stretched between them. Enjolras examining his face, and he scowled briefly before saying, “Yes. Whatever you must do.”

“It isn’t pretty,” Grantaire said, moving cautiously forward.

Enjolras’s eyes tracked him as best they could. “I will withstand it.”

Grantaire wiped his hands on his trousers. “I am sorry,” he said. “I wouldn’t take such a liberty if I had any other way.” He reached out to the fine-boned head on the floor, his reflexive disgust and horror smothered beneath the feelings that had always flooded him at Enjolras’s proximity, and a sickening swell of pleasure at seeing the object of his affections so dependent upon him.

Truly, Grantaire knew himself to be a depraved, useless man. This only cemented it. He cupped Enjolras’s cheeks and raised him from the floor, and Enjolras’s shock at the ease of the action, and the impossible angle Grantaire held him at, drew pity from Grantaire’s breast.

“I am sorry,” he said again, though what it was he was sorry for--there were so many things, after all--he could not have said. He carefully turned Enjolras around, trying not to touch anywhere too forward, or too painful. Blood oozed between his fingers, cool and sticky. He swallowed. He showed Enjolras the torn remains of his body, and heard his faint gasp.

“A death fit for Saint Denis,” Grantaire found himself saying. “A bayonet couldn’t have done the job, so it was by sword, too. Do you feel Divine speech coming upon you, compelling you to walk along your selfsame Rue and rouse Paris?”

“Please stop,” Enjolras said weakly. He sounded… broken. When Grantaire turned his head back around, he saw that Enjolras had squeezed his eyes shut, and that tears had cut runnels through the dried blood on his cheeks.

Shame filled Grantaire. He stroked his fingers through Enjolras’s curls. “Well, at least now I’ll finally get to be taller,” he said.

Enjolras opened his eyes, and he gazed up at Grantaire with such a look of despair that Grantaire felt as though the world itself, all of Paris, all of France, had died with them. He stumbled to his knees once more.

“I know I never believed in your cause,” Grantaire said. “But I believed in you, always. If anyone was to have convinced the people of Paris, it would have been you.”

“And I did that so well,” Enjolras said. “What am I, Grantaire? What have I become?”

“A martyr.” The words spilled from him before he could reconsider them. “I imagine the Romantics will be in raptures over your noble sacrifice.”

A grimace came over Enjolras’s fine features. “A martyr. I am no saint, I am nothing to be venerated. No one will remember me, and rightly so.”

Grantaire thought his heart might break. He brushed his thumbs over Enjolras’s cheeks, smearing together blood and tears. “It is my role to disdain the world,” he said softly. “Do not take it upon yourself, Enjolras, it is like watching rain fall upwards.”

“Like watching a dead man speak, you mean,” Enjolras said. “It seems now I cannot even die for my country. Perhaps you are right; perhaps God is a vicious bastard who cares nothing for His Creation.”

Tears pricked at Grantaire’s eyes. “Please don’t say that,” he said through the break in his voice. “I beg you. Not from you.”

“I am a _corpse_ ,” Enjolras spat. “What does it matter what I say?”

“You will always matter,” Grantaire said. There was a painful intimacy in holding Enjolras so close, never mind the nature of the bloody scraps he had been reduced to; Enjolras _saw_ him, and begged his aid, and now Grantaire found himself in the insane position of the faithless man trying to restore the belief of a man faithful. “Enjolras, what has happened today, it is--” he choked, the scope of his loss finally coming to him.

All dead. They were all dead, and he was alone, as he had feared--save for this apparition he held in his hands, and a hideous, stinging hope. The tears fell. “It is _ugly_ ,” he said. “It is fitting that I alone survive, the ugliest day for the ugliest man. But you were right. You were _right_ , it is the only way. France will never be free unless those within her shake off their apathy and--and--” he cut himself off, a spasm of grief and regret knifing through him. He curled in on himself from the pain of it.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I am sorry I was so worthless I could not see until now.”

It was the world on end: the dead spoke, the living died. Grantaire gritted his teeth. “What can I do,” he said. “I would die beside you, if I could.” He opened his eyes, and his breath caught.

Enjolras was looking up at him with an expression of quiet wonder. “You would die beside me?” he asked.

“Long live the Republic,” Grantaire replied. He said it as he had a thousand times before, with a mocking twist of the lips; but where before he had mocked Enjolras or his friends, now he mocked his own foibles, and the irony of his sincerity. Before, the words had sounded as hollow as the man who said them. Now, Grantaire was full: full of confusion, of grief and self-hatred and loneliness, but he was full of _hope_ as well, and a half-formed vision of the future leading away from the hellhole in which he sat. He was full, and the words when he said them now were solid as they never had been before.

“Grantaire,” Enjolras breathed. The wonder in his eyes transformed into joy, and when he smiled it was the most beautiful thing Grantaire had ever seen. He was blind to the blood and Enjolras’s gray skin, or the dull, bloody mats of his curls; Enjolras smiled at him, and it was as though Heaven had alighted in his heart, banishing darkness and sadness.

“Can I kiss you?” Grantaire blurted. He closed his eyes, mortified beyond reason with his own idiocy. “If you permit it.”

“Grantaire, look at me.”

He looked down at Enjolras, humiliation making his cheeks burn. Enjolras’s expression had gone thoughtful. He said, “Is that what you want?”

“I want many things,” Grantaire replied, laid bare in a way he could not remember being since childhood. “Most of them are dead below us. But this, yes. I want this.”

“Alright,” Enjolras said.

“I--what?”

“Alright,” Enjolras dutifully repeated. “You may kiss me.” His lips quirked, a compelling motion no matter the state of their owner’s existence. “I doubt many else would care to.”

Grantaire blinked at him, completely at a loss. “You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

Grantaire ducked his head, suddenly bashful. He wiped his nose on the shoulder of his shirt, and his face as best he could. It would be a very wet kiss, either way. Enjolras, jostled by these preparations, seemed amused more than disgusted. Grantaire gazed at him uncertainly, at the mercy of his quailing nerves.

“You will have to help me,” Enjolras said, gently urging.

Grantaire swallowed again and drew Enjolras’s head up to his own. He hesitated right before their lips touched. Enjolras sighed, his breath blood-scented and cool, and Grantaire closed the distance between them. 

When Grantaire had imagined this moment, in the few furtive occasions he had allowed himself the presumption, it had been frenzied, lustful. He had imagined their bodies twining, had imagined debasing positions for both of them, for half the pleasure in the fantasy was in ruination and shame. There could be nothing else for one such as him.

Those fantasies were gone, lost to an earnest, almost innocent desire that set Grantaire’s hands trembling. He kissed Enjolras, and it was chaste. Their lips brushed, soft and feather-light; gooseflesh rose down Grantaire’s arms. Enjolras returned it uncertainly, untutored in such intimate acts; he was an impossibly light burden, and Grantaire thought he could carry him for six miles and more, just on the memory of this kiss.

When he drew Enjolras away, he saw that his eyes were closed, and a strange, reverent look was upon his face. “I think I understand Combeferre a little better,” he finally said, and Grantaire’s heart sank.

“Was it so bad?”

Enjolras opened his eyes. “No,” he said simply. “It was not bad. Quite the opposite. I merely find myself regretful, and cognizant that some of the things which Combeferre told me, about the individual, selfish loves between people, were entirely correct.” He paused. “It is very frustrating that I don’t have my hands."

“What do you need,” Grantaire said, overcome. “Let me help.”

Enjolras gazed up at him, lingering and tender. “I had wanted to write down my thoughts. I think I may be dying in truth, now.”

Grantaire’s hands spasmed around Enjolras’s head. “Oh.”

“Perhaps God knew this moment needed to happen, and prolonged my life however He could. I don’t know. But I can feel the cold, Grantaire, and I do not believe I am long for this world.”

“I think Madame Hucheloup has some paper downstairs,” Grantaire said, holding back the many protestations that wanted to spill out instead.

“Take me with you?” Enjolras asked. “I would see the battlefield.”

The sun was beginning to set when Grantaire carried them down what remained of the stairs. The carnage was worse, here: Guardsman and workman alike lay strewn like so many felled trees in the wake of a storm, blood pooling in polite puddles or running over the crooked floors to seep between the boards. Grantaire held Enjolras before him, that he might see; and he wept, for the sight was hideous. Their friends were outside, Grantaire supposed, for which he was pitifully glad. A strange old man and a child lay together on the tables, in an odd sort of peace amidst the tumult of death; a black shroud had been laid over them, but the death throes of a militiaman had dragged it from their faces, baring them to the indecency of sullied air.

“We fought to keep this from happening again,” Enjolras said, his words a eulogy. “We died for France. The Revolution may have failed, but the Revolution still lives.”

“After night comes the dawn of day,” Grantaire said. The words felt clumsy in his mouth.

“Yes. Can you find paper?”

Grantaire did, a diary he found tucked in a Guardsman’s cartridge belt, and pencils, too. He took them back to the upper floor of the wine-shop, tossing the bodies of the fallen men to the floors below for the collectors that would come in the wee hours. He lit a small candle, and sweeping the bottles of his drunken rampage to the floor, set Enjolras upright in their stead. He opened the diary to a blank page and regarded it. Silence fell between them.

“I am sorry,” Enjolras said, and when Grantaire looked up, his expression was sober. “That you will have to go on alone,” he clarified. “We made our choices, and I will not deny them that dignity; but for your sake… It will be a long road, Grantaire.”

Grantaire’s hand shook around the pencil. “I will do my best to see they weren’t in vain,” he said. It was far more than he would have said before, and he meant it with a fixed, bitter determination he had forgotten his body could hold.

“Thank you,” Enjolras whispered, and then he began to speak. It was his final speech, and it was his finest. Grantaire did his best to capture the fire of the words, whispered as they were from blood-stained lips and feverish, roving eyes; Enjolras was not wholly in this world, anymore, and it seemed he gave more and more of himself with each word. Grantaire bit his lip and stove off tears, the better to see what he wrote. Corpse-collectors came and went; gunfire still echoed in the distance, though disappearing fast. Enjolras whispered, an oracle of old, and Grantaire wrote, the prophetes to his Pythia.

Finally, when the Morning Star was hovering above the horizon and the eastern sky lightening in hope of day, Enjolras said, “I am done.”

Grantaire laid the pencil down. “It is a masterpiece,” he said quietly.

“Take me to the window? I want to see the sun rise one last time.” Grantaire did, cradling Enjolras’s head in his arms so he could look out and see the light silvering the rooftops.

“You will care for my body?”

“I will.” 

“And write to my mother. Don’t… don’t tell her the particulars, they will only upset her.”

“Of course. Be at peace, Enjolras.”

When the first rays of the sun peaked over the cramped houses of Saint-Martin, Enjolras gave his last breath, a rattling sigh of relief. Grantaire stroked his golden curls and let himself feel the full sting of his grief. He had work to do, but first, he would allow himself this.

He mourned his friends, and he watched the dawn break over Paris.

***

END

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this absolutely spectacular](http://cparris.tumblr.com/post/106435047076/saint-denis-this-is-the-piece-i-made-for-the) piece of art. I saw it and I thought "that's Enjolras. What if Grantaire was the one holding his head." I mean, if anyone is going to take after St. Denis, who, besides being the patron saint of Paris, managed to give a sermon for six miles after being decapitated, it's Enjolras.


End file.
